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This is reasonable and perceptive and I suspect many people will agree. I don't though. There's a difference between £250 for the NHS and GATT24: time and context.
In a referendum campaign, we're particularly susceptible to this tactic, as £350 claim showed. But here were are ina leader campaign where both candidates say they're open to no-deal.
The real referendum-like crunch point would come in an election on it, or if it was literally about to happen with a PM forcing it through. In other words, it's in the future.
The GATT24 issues has been nerd fodder for about a year now. It's only recently really that it has been interrogated by mainstream journos.
And what have they found? Well after a lot of work by orgs like Commons Library, trade experts and former WTO officials, it is very clear that it is nonsense.
So this week that debate is happening at a mainstream level. But that has an effect. By if Johnson were to try to use it in October, or during an election, it could be closed down by journos hard, without a debate, as a proven black-and-white falsity.
This is why the fact-checking really does matter, even though we must be wary of the Cummings tactic. You have to still cling to what is true and false and show it to be so.
